TOC | Summary | Foreword | Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author

Muddling toward Democracy Political Change in Grassroots China

Introduction

Without democracy there can be no modernization. We will ensure that our people hold democratic elections, make policy decisions democratically, carry out democratic management and supervision, and enjoy extensive rights and freedoms under the law. The overall goal of our political restructuring is to build socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics while upholding and improving our basic political system.

—Jiang Zemin, October 30, 1997¹

     The study is also an effort to reintroduce China-as-China into public dialogue. Since the People’s Liberation Army moved forcibly into Beijing in June 1989, bringing a murderous end to weeks of peaceful protest, the bipartisan consensus on American foreign policy toward China has crumbled. Public debate often seems dominated by special interests—business, human rights, labor, right-to-life.² The realities and complexities of China itself —the most populous country in the world, with one of the oldest civilizations, in the throes of a profoundly unsettling economic and social transition—get lost in the debate.

     The situation in rural China is in danger of becoming part of that debate. Proponents of a new partnership with that country are predisposed to exaggerate the success of village elections. Those who view twenty-first-century China as a potential threat are inclined to conclude that village elections are a sham and sympathetic foreign observers of them dupes. But if it is true that no relationship in the twenty-first century will be more important for the United States than the one we have with China,³ then China must be understood for itself and not just as a tool of domestic political debate. As a recent evaluation of China’s future points out, “Getting China right is a deadly serious matter. . . . Ambitious American politicians should place China off-limits as a subject of demagoguery.”⁴

     My introduction to China’s village elections began with a chance meeting in February 1994 with Wang Zhenyao, then the deputy director of basic-level governance at China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. Wang was a visiting scholar at Harvard University that semester and had been in the audience during a presentation I made at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. My assigned topic was whether the United States should continue granting most favored nation status to China. I argued, on human rights grounds, that China’s most favored nation status should continue and opposed any policy that might isolate the Chinese people. Wang Zhenyao liked what I had to say.

     We met again several months later in Beijing. Wang was officially charged with nationwide implementation of competitive elections in China’s villages, and he began telling me about his work. Until then, I had known little of these village elections or what village committees did.

     Wang made clear that elections in rural China, though gaining wide acceptance among the peasants, were not the result of popular demand. Rather, village elections were the result of an unusual coalition between liberal political reformers and the country’s most conservative party elders, who had come to fear a breakdown of rural order following the collapse of people’s communes in the early 1980s. Far from heralding the introduction of competing political parties, elections were seen by conservatives as a way to preserve Communist Party rule—by bringing more honest, popular, and reform-minded leaders into positions of local power and thus forestalling dissent. Village elections were an example of “socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics.”

     Wang Zhenyao and the Ministry of Civil Affairs graciously helped arrange much of the field research for this study. In January 1995, I visited Fengyang county in Anhui province,⁵ where the commune system first began disintegrating, thus setting the stage for the introduction of village self-governance. Between January 1995 and March 1997, I observed three rounds of village elections—in Jilin, Sichuan, and Fujian provinces, in nearly twenty villages.⁶ To get a sense of the diversity of political organization in rural China, my friend Tong Yanqi, now a professor at the University of Utah, arranged for me to spend nearly a week with her, in November 1995, in a village we have agreed to call, pseudonymously, Bend in the River, where (admittedly half-hearted) attempts to hold elections have failed.⁷ This study thus begins (after an opening description of a 1995 election in a Sichuan village) with an overview of Fengyang county, an explanation of the collapse of people’s communes, and a discussion of the ensuing political uncertainty and of the debate over how to ensure both stability and legitimate political authority in the Chinese countryside. The second, and lengthiest, part of this study, based almost entirely on my field research, describes the range of village leadership in China today, on a continuum from least to most democratic.

     Despite growing international interest in China’s village elections and the enthusiasm with which some Americans have greeted them, the claims we can make about these elections are limited. We have no idea how many peasants live in villages with democratically elected leaders or how many still suffer under the rule of “local emperors.” China has some 1 million villages. International observers have witnessed, at most, only a few dozen elections. Although the quality of these contests varies considerably, foreigners are undoubtedly seeing the best of China’s village elections, in relatively prosperous areas. Many of China’s villages remain poor, and few of them are likely to be run democratically. This study emphasizes the diversity of rural China today—of village leadership, level of economic development, and sense of community—while exploring why some villages are more successful than others in progressing toward democratic rule. Perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn is the need for further research by both Chinese and foreign scholars.

     Our limited understanding nonetheless permits several relatively certain conclusions. First, the best elections are very good, recognizably competitive even with their distinctly Chinese characteristics. Second, enormous organizational efforts will be required to expand competitive elections into all of China’s villages. Third, for the foreseeable future, the evolution of the electoral process will be dictated by government officials rather than grassroots or nongovernmental organizations. A core of people at all levels of the political hierarchy—from the national-level Ministry of Civil Affairs, to the provincial civil affairs bureaus, to leaders in counties and townships—is determined to ensure that today’s models, the best examples of village elections, become commonplace.

     Longer-term development of basic-level democracy in China will require significant changes at both the bottom and the top. At the grassroots, democracy will remain stunted without the development of a more pluralistic, civil society. And the development of democracy will ultimately require a major commitment at the highest reaches of Chinese political power. Key people at this level pay public lip service to democratic reform, but no one has articulated a concrete vision. Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin, at the September 1997 meeting of the Fifteenth Party Congress and in his October 1997 visit to the United States, promised a future expansion of the electoral process.⁸ China’s recently selected premier, Zhu Rongji, has said that he is “in favor of democratic elections,” and leaves open the possibility that the positions of president and premier might eventually be elected.⁹ But he is cautious about timing. “We need some time to look at that,” he is reported as saying, “and it’s hard to predict when it will take place.”¹⁰ Much stronger, more explicit commitments will be necessary before major democratic progress can be made.

     To conclude that village elections represent the first step in a long-term process of democratization in China may thus be wishful thinking. The final part of this study must be tentative, offering a few thoughts about the future course of democratic reform in China and highlighting cooperative efforts by American nongovernmental organizations.

     China is in a period of tremendously rapid change, with underlying threats to stability and cohesion. The current Asian economic crisis has revealed how fragile rapid economic development can be, but few Americans fully appreciate how profoundly unsettling to ordinary people China’s momentous economic and social changes have been and will continue to be. The government has yet to face the several crises that the transition is bringing in its wake—a seriously overextended banking sector, parasitic state enterprises, massive internal migration, increasing unemployment, widespread official corruption, and a collapse of old values.

     This is thus a story without an ending. Although there is room for significant cooperation between the United States and China as the story unfolds, it is a history that China and the Chinese people will largely write themselves.

TOC | Summary | Foreword | Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author

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